Re: [PATCH 3/7] procfs privacy: misc. entries

[Alan Curry]

Dave Jones writes the following:
>
>On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 08:46:52PM +0200, Lorenzo Hernández García-Hierro wrote:
> > This patch changes the permissions of the following procfs entries to
> > restrict non-root users from accessing them:

[snip]
> >  - /proc/uptime
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ?!
[snip]

> >  - /proc/cpuinfo
>
>This is utterly absurd. You can find out anything thats in /proc/cpuinfo
>by calling cpuid instructions yourself.

Also it's the backend of glibc's get_nprocs(), also known as
sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN), a documented interface whose users are
probably not expecting it to suddenly become restricted to root.

>Please enlighten me as to what security gains we achieve
>by not allowing users to see this ?
>
>Restricting lots of the other files are equally absurd.
>
>I'd also be very surprised if various random bits of userspace
>broke subtley due to this nonsense.

Like uptime(1), a command which has existed basically unchanged since 3.0BSD
(note to observers: if you think that's a funny way of writing "FreeBSD 3.0",
you're off by at least a decade and a half).

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